work. life. open source. diatribes.

In the PDE team, we had this running joke that every Eclipse-related debate eventually degenerates into talking about the SWT_AWT bridge (this was true two EclipseCons ago, now every debate ends up talking about Provisioning/Update). Well, to make those SWT_AWT guys happy (especially on the Mac), we made a small change (fix) to how Eclipse applications are launched in PDE. In the past, we used to implicitly pass certain arguments (os,ws,arch,nl) to the framework, this is no longer true. In 3.3RC1, you’ll notice these arguments located in the program arguments box (explicitly).

We fought this change for awhile because in my eyes, it slightly complicates the launching user interface, but it was necessary to keep everyone happy. PDE will automatically migrate your old launch configurations (using some clever Debug APIs) so there’s no worry 🙂